Ludo Is Bringing Sexy and LudoBites Back to Breadbar

The world of cooking and chefs always ebbs and flows in Los Angeles. Days after Chef de Cuisine Craig Strong announced his May 20 departure from The Dining Room at The Langham Huntington, another local fave reappears on the scene. The highly celebrated and sorely missed LudoBites series will be back at Breadbar, when Chef Ludovic Lefebvre steps into the kitchen at the West Third Street location from Tuesday, May 19 through Saturday, August 22. The market/season-based, often unconventional dishes that comprise the taste-your-own-adventure-menu will be served at dinner every night from Tuesday to Saturday.

Our own Jonathan Gold was an admirer of the first LudoBites: "Ludovic Lefebvre's LudoBites at Breadbar seems as much like a revolution as it does like a party," he wrote in November of 2007, "a hardcore democratization of cuisine."

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Here's how Gold described part of the 2007 menu: "Some nights, there is a luxurious serrano-ham croque monsieur, the bread tar-black with squid ink, nudged toward impossible richness by a slice of foie gras nestled in with the cheese -- a version of this sandwich is one of the signatures of Lefebvre's French mentor, Pierre Gagnaire. A cool bowl of beet soup looks like borscht, but the flavor is unmistakably that of Spanish gazpacho, and the dab of sour cream turns out to be a spoonful of whipped goat cheese. A bowl of udon noodles, cooked softer than any Japanese chef would dare, is seasoned with the French-style Sri Lankan curry blend called vadouvan, but with its citrus-peel tang and burnt-onion sweetness, it tasted more like a bowl of the thick Iranian soup asht than like anything else, a four-culture carom shot that somehow seemed absolutely right."

What will be on the menu of LudoBites 2.0?

Many of the dishes involve quotation marks: a squid ink "crepe" with chorizo, egg, ham and cheese; lobster gazpacho with Parmesan marshmallow and exotic fruits; caramelized cod with blood orange, fleur de sel and broccoli; "Bird and strings," AKA fried chicken and pommes frites; pork ribs with English peas guacamole "Francaise" style with wasabi and "imaginary" choucroute; and spicy chocolate mousse with orange juice and extra virgin olive oil. And those are just the preliminary sketches of some of Ludo's summer ideas.

Until then, Hollywood Gelson's happens to have a couple copies of Ludo's sexy book left at an excellent price if you want to try your own version of LudoBites at home.